


What Doesn't Suck

by LadyCapsicle



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Established Relationship, Ficlet, Low Blood Sugar, M/M, Stucky - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 20:08:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,403
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2038386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyCapsicle/pseuds/LadyCapsicle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just a short ficlet of what happens when Bucky's sugar drops in the middle of the night.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Doesn't Suck

He was strapped down. The world was black and white, sirens screamed overhead and he couldn't move. A black mask hovered over his face saying something in German. He pulled against the restraints and the fear. Not again he begged as the needle was held up in front of his face. He could see a glint in the eyes of the masked man above him and he pulled against the restraints hard enough to jolt him awake, his eyes opening and focusing on the sparsely furnished room around him. 

He isn't strapped down, not really. Steve's heavy arm is wrapped around his middle, but it is easy enough to move. Bucky is burning up, sweat rolling off his chest. He lifts his hand to find it shaking. Fucking blood-sugar. Just another wonderful gift the Red Room had left him with. He pulls Steve's arm off him as gently as he can and slides out of bed. Stumbling into the next room, he latches onto the refrigerator door allowing it to keep him upright. The world shakes, his heart races, and he pants. _Fucking blood-sugar._ The nightmares were just his body's way of saying _get up, something is trying to kill you._ Funny how that something was his own damn body.

Taking a long breath in the vain hope of steadying himself he opens the door and grabs the OJ. He hated the stuff, far to bitter and acidic for his tastes, but it is the fastest way to stop the downward spiral of his sugar. His legs are weak and all he wants to do is sit. The cool tile beneath his feet would feel good on his hot shaking body, it would cool him, but he couldn't. If I sit now, I won't be able to get back up. He gulps down the orange juice and scours the fridge looking for food that would help. All he can see was meat and vegetables, everything needed cooking. The juice would help for a while but he needed quick food to keep his sugar high. 

Bucky sets the OJ on the counter behind him with his metal arm - the only part of his body not shaking right now. The last thing he needs is to clean spilled, life-saving, orange juice off the ground at 2:30 in the morning. He was burning up, the shaking hurt, aching through his bones, and all he wanted to do was sit down and cry.

When Steve first brought him back to Stark tower, he had control over very little. But they worked through it. As time passed, he remembered, he shook the brainwash, and the programming. He stopped thinking of Steve as mission and started to think of him first as friend and then more. Even with Nat there knowing the steps, helping him along, pulling his brain out of it's programing was the hardest thing he ever had to do. The lack of desire to eat only made things worse. Everyone assumed the moodiness and eventual seizures had to do with his arm and the drugs. That's what happens when you put a Stark in charge, he guessed. It wasn't until Dr. Banner showed up, noticed his lack of appetite and decided to run some tests did they find that his metabolism burned through sugar at an alarming rate. Not a brainwashing thing, not drug thing, nothing to do with his arm, just a normal human problem. His body needing fuel. He remembered being relieved at that, back before he understood it. 

“Low again, Buck?” Steve asks from the doorway. 

“Go away,” he answers through gritted teeth trying to think and function through the haze. 

Steve joins him hin the kitchen and pats his arm, “I'll make you a sandwich, go sit down.” 

The anger overtakes his body in clenched muscles and death glares. He can do it. He can order his legs to stay upright long enough to make a sandwich, he doesn't need Steve to baby him. He had done it plenty of times. He looked up at Steve and thought a million things at him, wanting to yell at Steve, to tell him to fuck off. Behind the haze he knew that Steve was just trying to help but the anger covered it. Panic mode had no voice of reason. His body simply wanted him to do the thing that would save it as fast as possible, sitting and waiting didn't ever seem like a good idea. 

“JUST GO BACK TO BED!” Bucky yells. 

Steve doesn't bother with saying anything else, he has spent far too long with Bucky to take anything he said in a sugar daze personal. He ducks around him grabbing the bread and the peanut butter and jelly, moving as fast as he can around Bucky while casually watching him out of the corner of his eye. Bucky was known to through a punch or two during his episodes, and Steve would rather not have to see the look of pain and humiliation Bucky would give him every time he saw the bruise. 

The sandwich is done in seconds. 

“Sit down before you fall down, soldier,” Steve says in his most authoritative voice. 

Orders are orders, and Bucky is hard pressed not to follow them. So he sits - in the middle of the kitchen with his back against the fridge and the cool tile floor pressing against his bare legs. 

Steve hands him the sandwich and steps over him, grabbing a plastic cup out of the cupboard and filling it with the Oj. He brings the cup and the carton down with him and he sits across from Bucky.

Bucky chews as fast as he can force his jaw to go. Now that he has reached the point when his sugar stops dropping, and starts rising. It's harder to control his motor functions. The point where the adrenaline that woke him up and got him to the kitchen starts failing and all he can feel is the heat of his skin against the cool floor and the scared panic that slowly subsides. He knows it will all be gone in a few minutes, that the first long swig of OJ has already started working it's way through his system, and that the sandwich will only help. He knows that the anger will ebb and he'll feel guilty for waking Steve up in the middle of the night, for the yelling, for the anger, so he stays quiet. He slowly munches through the PB&J, taking sips of the OJ that Steve holds out to him, and staring very determinedly at his own kneecaps. The sandwich is gone in a matter of minutes and the cup has been filled twice before the he can feel the sweat on his body start to cool and his anger with it. The urge to cry and kick and fight recedes and he's left with the feeling of being full and annoyed and suddenly very cold. 

“Better?” Steve asks when Bucky finally looks back up at him.

Bucky nods “Thanks.” He knows he could probably stand up, go back to bed and have Steve wrap around him to warm him up again, but he doesn't want to. Not yet. Instead he scoots across the floor until he is between Steve's outstretched legs, his back to Steve’s chest and leans against him. Steve doesn't question, just wraps his arms around Bucky and presses a kiss into his hair. 

Bucky closes his eyes and lets out the breath he had been holding. The sugar drops never get easier, the blind panic his body puts him through takes it's toll every time. He'll be exhausted tomorrow, no matter how much longer he sleeps. They have a mission in the morning, and have to be up in a few hours to catch the plane, and it's going to suck no matter what. What doesn't suck is the feeling of Steve against his back, the warm weight of his arms wrapped around him. What doesn't suck is that Steve isn't mad that Bucky accidentally woke him up, he doesn't mind coming to his rescue. What doesn't suck is that Steve would sit on the cold hard ground for the rest of the night, mission tomorrow be damned, if it is what wmakes Bucky feel better. 

Sugar drops sucked, but at least he didn't have to go through them alone.

**Author's Note:**

> As a diabetic I've been through this a lot and always struggle with how to explain how it feels. But one night through my haze I was imagining what would be going through Bucky's head if it happened to him and thus this was born.


End file.
